How 'The Yellow Wallpaper' Changed Women's Medicine

At the turn of the twentieth century, the ‘New Woman’ was shaking things up. She wore trousers! She rode bicycles! She wrote proto-feminist short stories! She angered the patriarchy and championed women’s rights.
But just as women began to seek control of their lives and bodies, there arose a medical vogue for diagnosing women with nervous disorders that helped to keep them in line. Funny that!

In response to this form of oppression, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a tale of madness, medical abuse, sisterhood, and power. Come with me as we discover how Perkins Gilman, and other women writing at the turn of the twentieth century, fought back against the patriarchal establishment and brought about change that we’re still feeling the repercussions of today.

Watch more about what people thought of TB 250 years ago here:    • Why people thought tuberculosis was hot  

Written, presented, and edited by Rosie Whitcombe
@books_ncats

Directed, produced, and edited by Matty Phillips
@ma_ps_
mphotos.uk



Bibliography
Cameron, S. Brooke, ‘George Egerton’s Keynotes: Food and Feminism at the Fin-de-Siècle', Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46 (2018) pp. 309-30

Lee, Grand, Perkins Gilman, Showalter, & Woolson in Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle, ed. by Elaine Showalter (London: Virago Press, 1993)

Endometriosis in the UK: Time for Change https://www.endometriosis-uk.org/site...

‘From Nerves to Neuroses’, Science Museum: Objects and Stories [https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/obje...]

Hedges, Elaine R., ‘Afterword’, The Yellow Wallpaper (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973)

Hughes, Kathryn, ‘House of horror: the poisonous power of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...

Ledger, Sally, and Luckhurst, Roger, ‘The New Woman’, The Fin-de-Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880-1900 (Oxford: OUP, 2013) p. 76

Patmore, Coventry, ‘Canto IX: Sahara, The Wife's Tragedy’, The Angel in the House (London: George Bell and Son, 1885)

Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago Press, 1987)